Phoning it in

I pride myself on never phoning it in. I’m a passionate individual and I try to
always bring that fire into whatever I’m doing. I’m a big believer in Extreme
Ownership
and giving 110%, cranking it 11, or whatever other euphemism you
can throw in to describe the situation.

That said, about once I year I give in and end up phoning it in on my blog.

Usually it’s because I have writer’s block and just don’t know what to write
about. This time though, this time is special, a perfect storm, in more ways
than one.

In no particular order, the last few weeks have included:

  • Bug swatting at work after launching a ground up rewrite of our web
    application.
  • The worst winter storm Texas has seen in the last few decades. We only got
    water back today (5 or so days without) and I’ve yet to take a shower at the
    time of this writing.
  • We had to say good-bye to the last little dude from our grumble of pugs.
  • Been putting in a ton of time into one of my side projects building some new
    tools to help us better manage our data and improve things for our customers.
  • Oh, and it’s my birthday next week.

As busy, bad, whatever, as things have been, I’ve upheld a positive attitude and
have stepped in and up where I can.

So what’s this post even about? Just a friendly reminder to folks that bad days
happen, but you can’t phone it in so quickly. Sometimes shit rolls down hill,
happens in threes, or whatever and you may end up with a bad week or month.

If you start to phone it in the moment you have a bad day, you’re going to fall
behind quickly. Startups (businesses as a whole really) have peaks and valleys,
and sometimes the slog can last months. All we can really do is stay on our
grind and keep trying to improve by 1% a day.

We also need to take a moment to reflect and acknowledge the wins that may be
mixed in.

Given everything going on, some positives have definitely shown through:

  • My team at work has been starting to gel more and we’re starting to operate
    like a well oiled machine.
  • As bad as the storm was and as I smell right now, we were extremely fortunate
    that we never lost power (aside from a few blips) and seems our pipes are all
    still intact.
  • We found an awesome local pug breeder and are already on the list for their
    next litter later this year. Pug pack 2.0 coming soon!
  • For the second time in my side hustlin’ career, I reached $100k+ all-time
    gross revenue on a project.

And if nothing else, even though I’m phoning in this week’s blog post, I was
still able to write quite a bit just to say that I’m not really doing a post
this week 🙂

Josh Sherman - The Man, The Myth, The Avatar

About Josh

Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.


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